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Maps and HyperBase42: Charting the Hypergrid

The map on the left is my first attempt to summarize all the different grids and regions we’ve visited with the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. It also shows the hypergrid routes we’ve taken in the course of our exploration.

I deliberately did not include things like coordinates and hypergrid addresses, since I wanted this map to be an overview and more of a conceptual outline.

If you’re interested in more maps of the hypergrid, check out this blog post by Vanish Seriath. He’s written a very detailed explanation of how the coordinate system works with hypergrid.

Fragmented Hypergrid Realms

There are three primary versions of Opensim in use today, and unfortunately they each use incompatible versions of the hypergrid protocol (HG 1.5 i7, HG 1.5 i6 and HG 1.0). You can hypergrid jump between grids using the same hypergrid protocol, but you cannot jump between ones running different versions.

The Hypergrid Adventurers Club’s home base is on the region Pathlandia on jokaydiaGRID. All of the grids that ReactionGrid hosts are running HG 1.0, and this includes jokaydiaGRID. Since stability is the primary concern for all of ReactionGrid’s education and business customers, upgrades are done conservatively and only after much testing. ReactionGrid plans to upgrade to the latest version of Opensim sometime in early 2011.

Until the dust settles with all the different versions of the hypergrid protocol, trying to explore the various realms of the hypergrid will continue to be a challenge. Thankfully, a very active Hypergrid Adventurers Club member named Neo Cortex has started a great new project to address this issue.

The Beginnings of HyperBase42

Neo’s plan is to create a HG 1.5 i6 grid that serves as a base of operations for people interested in exploring similarly compatible grids. You can read all about HyperBase42 on Neo’s new blog. He’s currently looking for more input and volunteers, so please leave comments on his blog if you’re interested.

I think this is a simply fantastic idea. One of my goals in starting the Hypergrid Adventurers Club was to cultivate a community of people who would be inspired to start their own projects involving exploration and knowledge sharing. Neo’s HyperBase42 is a fantastic example of that kind of positive growth.

Pioneers work together, exploring new territories and helping communities expand into brave new worlds. Here’s to a new year of fascinating new projects and growth with Opensim and Hypergrid. Let’s predict the future by inventing it. Together.

After much hesitation, i’ve decided to cut myself from the (quite large) hg 1.0 realm to jump to hg 1.5. I need to run 0.7.0.2 in order to benefit bug fixes and mantis only relevant ones. Maintaining two versions of the database was too much of a pain. Goodbye 0.6.9.

Thanks for this great post, Pathfinder. While this price hike has torwhn plans and peace of mind into the air for many, it is an expansion. Tools.Jam meets every Tuesday in Second Life and this past week we agreed that it is the community that we fear will be lost. As a result, we talked about what we could use to extend our network beyond the walls of an individual platform and how we might ensure notices of meetings and events are available no matter what the location of your work. The Web offers many chances for this and what struck me yet again was that while we may be annoyed and even traumatized by the sudden changes, we are learning and adapting. This has been the inspiration for a great deal of wonderful gadgetry and a great deal of comraderie developing between those who were previously strangers.We parted feeling that in the very near future we might maintain multiple avatars capable of attending meetings on any of several platforms. Yes, it complicates our lives, but irritation is how you make pearls and something tells me that we are all on the verge of a growth spurt. (We also like the Sim on a USB, thanks to you, Peter and Ener for sharing that.)

I will stick to scheme://host:port[:region]/, always adding a trailing slash since it makes the link active in web browsers, most text editors, and chat. I’ve noticed that “secondlife” scheme is always delegated to the active client when used inside (built-in web browser) regardless of operating system declaration which may point to another client than the running one.

You will discover a minimal, boring region with nothing fun. Expect lag since it is behind a 10/1 Mbps DSL. Maybe an interesting test point for “sims@home”. It’s also running on a less-than-optimal 3Gb MacMini found in my hardware dump. Cheap gridding.